Webfooted Weblog

Worst thing about British pubs is not the prices – though I have to say, they are pretty shocking! It’s the rubbish standard of service, the queuing forever at the bar, dirty glasses, surly staff who make out they are doing you a tremendous favour serving you in the first place. And unless you choose one of the few independent pubs, the beer is pretty poor too. And does anywhere in the South of England know how to keep Guinness properly?

CF. continental Europe, where you sit down with your friends and a few minutes later, someone (often an unbelievably pretty waitress) takes your order. You can choose from a list of beers – and there are generally quite a few good ones, in amongst the dross. Most of the time, if you are a stranger in town, you can enquire which is the best brew to try first. This is an altogether much more pleasant and relaxed way to enjoy your beer.

If you are with someone who doesn’t drink alcohol, e.g. Mrs Goose, then the establishment will offer you coffee, hot chocolate or at least something that she likes. Whilst prices tend to be very close to UK ones these days, due to the plummeting value of Sterling against the Euro, the quality of service makes the price worth while.

No wonder UK pubs are closing at such a rapid rate. They seem stuck in a post-WW2 time-warp or something and seem to think that having an ear-splittingly loud jukebox and a few plastic oak beams will provide the “atmosphere” needed to get the punters through the door, and compensate for the grunting bar-staff. And don’t get me started on the horror they call “quiz-nites“. UK pubs simply have not caught up with what customers really want, i.e. a bit of service, please! Frankly “yer average boozer” here in Sunny Southampton is simply dreadful and they would have to pay me to set-foot through the door.

Now where’s that crate of McEwan’s Champion? Honk! Honk!

A Chinese company is claiming that Apple actually ripped the idea off from one of its existing Chinese-made products, called a “P88“. The P88 has been on sale for six months according to the company’s president, Mr Xiaolong Wu. The P88 easy to recognise because it “looks just like a big iPhone“.

Seems Shenzhen Great Loong Brother Industrial Co., Ltd. is threatening to sue Apple for “Plagiarism“. Presumably by this it means some sort of intellectual property theft? Despite its similar looks, the P88 is actually quite different under the bonnet from the iPad. It has a 250 Gigabyte hard disk, an ethernet port and three USB ports. It also runs Windows or Linux. The touch screen is only a single touch resistive type. But the processor is, in theory at least, faster than the iPad.

Personally I wouldn’t touch the P88 if it came bundled with Windows – I refuse to pay Windows Tax! And I wouldn’t have an iPAD under any circumstances while it was so riddled with DRM. However, I think the P88 pad, at the right price, running Linux and 100% FOSS could actually be quite an attractive product – if you like that sort of thing.

Whichever way this goes, it certainly rains on the proverbial parade for Apple Computer Inc., which is never a bad thing, in my view. It also makes it very difficult for Apple to sue any of its competitors in this context. So, If I were a gambling goose, then I’d place my bets on seeing a large range affordable clone tablets pretty soon. I would expect some of these to be far superior to the iPad – particularly for those who despise DRM and who care about their privacy – and a heck of a lot cheaper too!

Funny old world, huh! Honk! Honk!

When I first heard about iPads, I thought it was something that geek girls might use during their iPeriods. But it seems I was mistaken.

Actually, I think the tablet form factor is an interesting one and may have great appeal in areas such as education. That’s why Nicolas Negroponte and his team have adopted it for the next generation X0-3 OLPC. However I have serious misgivings with regard to both the price and even more so with regard to Apple’s heavy-handed deployment of DRM (digital restrictions management) in these devices. In a nutshell, Apple can:-

• Decide what software you are allowed to use.
• Delete any content it disapproves of.
• Disable the device completely.

Nevertheless, a reasonable degree of commercial success for the iPad will no doubt inspire Chinese and Taiwanese companies to produce perfectly adequate generic clones. These will be significantly cheaper than the iPad, whilst not being infected with Apple DRM. Then it would not take the open source community long to write and compile decent apps for the clones. I understand that the XO-3 will be 100% OSS (open source software). So I suspect that many existing OSS apps will be ported to the generic pads very rapidly.

Therefore I’m perfectly happy to let the Apple fanbois have their fun. If they are prepared to pay through-the-nose whilst Steve Big Jobs & his minions @ Apple Computer Inc. spy on their data and dictate what apps they can and cannot use, then more fool them! Meantime, smart people will wait for one of the new generation generic pads that will undoubtedly follow – running some form of GNU/Linux and c/w 100% open source software of course.

Translated into practical terms my little goslings, that means 1/3 the cost of an iPad, 100% freedom regarding what software you install and infinite superiority in terms of privacy and security.

Honk! Honk!

References:-

This was the title of a blog post over at ZDNet. So should you dump Internet Exploder. Now let me see…

Yes! Yes! Yes! Along with all Microsoft’s other products!

Let’s stand back from this for a minute folks. Microsoft is a big, greedy, highly profitable US corporation that has systematically stifled its competition whilst deploying a variety of highly dubious methods to force equipment manufacturers to bundle its products. Microsoft has a long track record of producing poor quality and insecure products. Meantime, its senior executives have become very rich indeed. One would have more sympathy with Microsoft if it had poured its vast profits back into securing its products. But it hasn’t.

I hope that legislatures around the planet will go much further than just recommending users stop using one of Microsoft’s products. I hope they will explicitly outlaw Microsoft “bundling”, so that consumers actually have a choice of operating system. It is entirely unacceptable that consumers are forced to buy Windows whenever they buy a new computer. Why should we be forced to pay what amounts to a “Windows Tax” to Microsoft, regardless of whether we want to use its rotten products or not?

The good news is that it seems the Microsoft racket is finally unravelling. I would say to consumers everywhere, now would be a very good time to write to your MP/congressman. Complain to your national/regional consumer protection organisations. If you can buy equipment OS-free then do so. Boycott IT suppliers that still persist with bundling. The writing is on the wall my little goslings…

The Hungarian Government recently voted its public sector should adopt open standards:-

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10419262-16.html

http://nyissz.hu/blog/10-points-on-the-mandatory-use-of-open-standards-in-hungary/

Meantime it seems the good people of Italy have started a class action against Microsoft to get their Windows Tax refunded:-

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/01/italian-class-action-suit-targets-unwanted-windows-installs.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

The GarfNet team successfully dumped Microsoft back in May 2007 and it was one of the best business decisions they ever made. Moreover, it proved beyond all reasonable doubt that Microsoft-free businesses are perfectly viable:-

Actually MS-free businesses are more than merely “viable”. Being free from Microsoft has considerable advantages, both in terms of cost and in operational terms, i.e. reliability, security, ease of replicating systems, lack of malware etc.:-

Meanwhile GarfNet is compiling a formal complaint to the UK Office of Fair Trading and to the European Union Competition Commission regarding the forced payment of Windows Tax here in the UK. There is still a lot of work to do but this is the progress so far:-

Final comment before the Microsoft apologists and “fanbois” get up-in-arms. I’m not actually advocating the total annihilation of Microsoft. However I think the world would benefit from a much downsized Microsoft, with much lower profits and perhaps a 20-30% market share. I have no doubt that a Microsoft that actually had to compete in the marketplace would produce higher quality and more secure products. This would be better for the consumer, better for national security, better for the economy and better for the IT industry. Long term it might even be better for Microsoft too!

Though I suspect that I will stick with the Penguinisitas, whatever happens to Micro$haft. Honk! Honk!

Seems its not just the Germans who have serious misgivings regarding Micro$haft’s ailing Internet Explorer web browsing software.

Today the French information agency CERTA (Centre d’Expertise Gouvernemental de Réponse et de Traitement des Attaques informatiques) also issued a warning to French users advising them to give Internet Explorer a wide berth:-

In a blackly comic twist, a comedian (he must be a comedian in order to say the things he said) from Microsoft’s propaganda department called Cliff “Trust-me-I’m-from-Microsoft” Evans claimed that Internet Explorer version 8 is really more secure than other browsers. In a two-minute-long harangue largely consisting of inane drivel, half-truths and omissions, punctuated with the occasional downright lie, published in video form on the BBC website, Evans says users must look at the overall security picture.

In a nutshell, users should ignore the fact that Microsoft Internet Explorer has more holes than a Swiss cheese and carry on using it anyway. Whilst droning on about the virtues of Internet Explorer, Evans neglected to mention that the same vulnerability that allowed hackers to gain illegal access to Chinese users’ gMail accounts last week, still remains un-patched and probably won’t be fixed until next month!

Nor did Evans mention that some of those who were let down by his company’s appallingly poor-quality products were in fact Chinese dissidents that now risk being arrested, imprisoned, and even tortured or executed.

However, in-line with our European colleagues, the official word from the Goose Pond, regarding Internet Explorer, my little goslings, remains pretty much the same as in my last post, namely:-

Don’t use Microsoft products, ever!

Microsoft’s problematic Internet Explorer web browsing software has raised the ire of the German Authorities.

Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (which translates to Federal Office for Information Security), issued an unprecedented warning to users, not to use Microsoft Internet Explorer. This follows the discovery of a security hole that led to attacks against Google and other US companies by hackers, allegedly based in China.

Deutche Welle’s rather excellent “Broken Internet Explorer” logo

The warning applies to all the latest versions of Internet Explorer, namely versions 6, 7 and 8:-

Instructions telling hackers how to exploit the security hole are available on the web – but I haven’t found them yet! However, the US Department of Homeland Security has published more details of the problem. Seems it is a so-called zero-day exploit and Microsoft does not have a fix for it yet.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has tried to play the affair down. Since it is unable to offer a patch, Microsoft has offered a “workaround” instead. Basically it involves putting your browser into what some refer to as “cripple mode” by setting the Internet Zone Security setting to “High“. However, the German authorities say even this won’t make it safe.

The reason for the furore is that it seems Google’s Chinese servers were attacked by hackers exploiting one of Internet Explorers many security holes. Machines belonging to Chinese gMail users were compromised via Microsoft Internet Explorer, allowing hackers to get access to their gMail accounts.

It seems this has allowed the Chinese Authorities to obtain vital information regarding dissidents. If this is true then, it could result in imprisonment, torture or even death. Of course, we don’t know how deep these attacks have gone and no one has actually proven it was the Chinese behind the attacks either. After all, the United States has a long and sad history of creating “bogeymen” to act as scapegoats for all evils of the world. And if there is one government that is less trustworthy than China’s, it is that of the United States – along with the British one of course!

Likewise, Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Microsoft Windows has a long and sad history of serious security flaws, one of which is that your machine can become infected with malware simply by visiting a website. Worse, Windows fans – people daft enough to believe all the rubbish than emanates from the spindoctors at Redmond – will tell you that its the user’s responsibility to make sure a website is safe before you visit it. I’m not sure how exactly? Thousands of perfectly legitimate sites are hacked every day.

Fortunately, it seems that the computer-using public is slowly waking up to the fact that Internet Explorer is indeed a very poor quality product. According to hitslink.com it seems that Firefox has 25% of the market and the combined market share of all the Internet Explorer versions has fallen to 63%. Interesting to see what the figures look like in a couple of weeks, don’t you think?

Moreover, the W3Schools stats make really interesting reading. Granted, its clientèle is likely to favour standards-based browsers. Nevertheless, its figures indicate that IE’s combined share has fallen to below 40%:-

A couple of final notes of caution…

Firstly, many of the articles regarding this debacle refer to the BSI. This is of course the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, which translates to (German) Federal Office for Information Security, not the British Standards Institution. Interestingly the somewhat pro-Microsoft British Government has remained very, very quiet on the subject!

Secondly, the official Goose advice to computer users who really want to remain safe, regardless of what country you live in:-

“No matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in” is the title old Neil Innes/Vivian Stanshall song, written in the late 1960’s.

http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/n/
nomatterwhoyouvoteforthegovernmentalwaysgetsin.shtml

Forty years later and it seems that today the lyrics of the Bonzo Dog’s humourous little ditty have become frighteningly relevant. Fact is that our once-proud nation is not far from becoming a dictatorship. Sure the faces in Parliament change from time-to-time. But the policies don’t. Neither do the lies and cover-ups. For example, have you ever tried to find out how much of our money has been wasted on say Iraq and Afghanistan? Basically you can’t because of “national security“. In fact, these are some of the least accountable and most opaquely funded wars in modern history.

Granted they’ll tell us about the dead, because it’s hard to hide flag-draped coffins. Besides, nicely-presented dead service-people boost national morale, according to some MOD “thinkers“. It makes people more enthusiastic about the wars(s), aparently. Personally I find that notion utterly obscene and it breaks my heart every time I see one. But you try to find out how many of our young people have been crippled for life? You can’t! It’s secret! In fact, everywhere you look, vital pieces of information are being withheld from us, supposedly “for our own good“. To compensate, we are fed a never-ending diet of soft porn, crime drama and reality TV by the very media whose job it is to keep us informed. That’s because in reality we actually have no real opposition to Government at all, if you think about it…

Over the last 20 years, we have seen a steady erosion of our civil liberties and freedoms, whilst our Governments and the corporations that line their pockets have robbed us blind and scared us into believing it is “for our own protection“. I’m not saying the proverbial grass is greener. I think actually it is worse in places like the United States where the so-called “anti-terror” legislation has given them the Patriot Act – meaning amongst many other things that librarians had to tell the Government what books you are reading! So much for the “Land of the Free“!

But the fact is that right here, right now in Old Blighty, we are sleepwalking our way towards a police state, whilst being forced to pay ever higher taxes for ever poorer services. Today we are expected to tolerate a level of corruption, obfuscation and incompetence from those that are paid to protect us, on a scale that was unimaginable even thirty years ago. Yet anyone who dares to complain is branded a “traitor“, “unpatriotic“, a “terrorist sympathiser” or told simply that he or she “should be grateful“.

Well I’m not!

Check out Ralph Nader’s “Corporate Fascism” video. Takes a few minutes to get going. But stick with it. This guy explains the phenomenon far, far better than I can:-
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do…76553130&hl=en

Honk! Honk!

The other day, someone accused me of being a conspiracy theorist. So I thought as long and hard about this as my little goosy brain would allow.

You see, I really don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories. I think our present situation (e.g. the stupid, costly wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, MP’s fiddling their expenses, financial meltdown, banker’s outrageous bonuses et al) is better explained by cock-up theory – obviously with generous measures of good, old-fashioned greed, ignorance and stupidity thrown-in.

If one considers that Fiascos R US our Government, and many of those who run our “great” corporations really could not organise a proverbial booze-up in a brewery, and that primarily their main objective is fast, short-term gains, then it is hard to imagine that anything they conspired to do would ever have very much long-term success. Therefore, I believe it is cock-up and not conspiracy that really gives our current situation its lingering, dung-like aroma and consistency.

Honk! Honk!

Seems that once again, one of the most highly taxed nations on Earth, is about to suffer yet another tax. This time everyone who has a landline will pay £6.00 a year extra tax. And they will pay VAT on top of that. All landline subscribers will have to pay, regardless of whether they use the internet or not.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology…igital-britain

Granted, the so called Broadband Tax is small compared to many of the others that UK citizens have to endure and the scheme is correspondingly shabby and cut-price when you actually look at the figures. The aim is for 2Mbit/s line to 90 % of households by 2017 – which will seem decidedly third-world by then.

http://www.itproportal.com/portal/ne…broadband-tax/

If one studies the scheme in more detail then it becomes clear just how shabby it really is…

1. 10% of households will still not have broadband by 2017 even if the scheme is a success – which is doubtful.
2. The 2 MBit/s is notional. The lines are likely to have 50:1 contention meaning that real speeds could be considerably slower.
3. 90% broadband by 2017 seems very third-rate compared with France’s “Haut Debit Pour Tous” or “Broadband for All” which it plans to have in place by 2012. http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/f…ans/2009-12-09
4. The tax raised, approximately £170 million, is chicken feed. To put this in perspective, it is just over a tenth of the £1.5 billion that the taxpayer is paying in bonuses to the senior execs of the failed City of London banks this year.
5. Meantime, our national telecoms provider, British Telecom PLC (AKA BT) reckons it actually needs £5 billion to do the job properly.

Much of the blame for our hopeless telecoms system actually rests with BT in the first place. This is a highly privileged profit-making company, born out of Margaret Thatchers privatisation programme in the 1980s. Since then, it has become both a laughing stock and a national disgrace. BT is just as arrogant as it was when it was the GPO but with none of the public service ethic. It was clear in the mid 1990’s that our communications infrastructure was woefully inadequate. Yet BT once again put its short term profits before the long term needs of its customers and did as little as possible to rectify the situation.

Meantime the Government & its toothless watchdogs watched it all go pear-shaped but did nothing to stop it. Now, if we had a Government that actually stood up to useless greedy corporations such as BT, then it would legally compel BT to sort the mess out at its own expense. If BT failed to do so in a timely manner, then the Government could deploy a number of fairly major sanctions against it, for example:-

1. Sackings, heavy fines or even prison terms for BT’s senior board members who failed to meet their legal obligations.
2. Renationalise BT perhaps by confiscating the stock holdings of its major shareholders.
3. Break up BT and allow its competitors to operate key areas of its business. Of course, competitors who took over BT’s businesses would face similar sanctions if they failed to deliver. This is to avoid another recurrence of Virgin Media Syndrome, i.e. “So what if we’re rubbish? We’re not as bad as BT, so there’s nothing you can do about it!“

Now that would get my vote!

Real problem though is the Government has run out of money. It won’t actually say what it squandered on Iraq and Afghanistan, but it runs into billions. Added to which, Brown’s chronic mismanagement of the economy and particularly the banking sector has meant that cash that should be used for improving our nation’s crumbling infrastructure is being wasted propping up failed banking corporations (and paying their senior execs yet another £1.5 billion in bonuses). The financial services fiasco is currently costing an average of £5,500.00 to every family in the country and could rise to a staggering £40,000.00 in the near future.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
finance/newsbysector/
banksandfinance/6722123/
Bailing-out-the-banks-cost-5500-per-family.html

Yet Brown and his hapless buddies at Fiascos R Us er, I mean the British Government continue to squander vast sums of our money. For example, MP’s of all parties still have their greedy, slobbering snouts very heavily embedded in the proverbial trough as they continue to submit their highly dubious expenses claims. Who can blame them? Brown’s much publicised clean-up, like so many of his policies, was as useless and ineffective as he is.

This means there are no water-tight guarantees that the money will actually go where it should anyway! Still, I guess an additional £170,000,000 would clean a heck of a lot of moats and buy an awful lot of new duck houses, flat-screen TV’s, flats for your relatives, porn videos, second homes, scatter cushions etc. etc. etc. A fact that many “Honourable” Members of the House have convincingly proven already!

Worse, it’s only 10% of what’s being donated by the taxpayer this year in order to pay the bonuses of those poor old failed-bank executives in the City of London. Now I foolishly thought it would be nice if we could use some of that money to update our Broadband provision rather than introducing yet another tax. But then I realised that we can’t have the poor little lambkins in the City going without their brand-new Porsches now, can we?

Of course, if we have a change of Government next year, then the Broadband Tax will probably be dropped anyway.

Honk! Honk!

I was browsing my way through a UK technology forum the other day when I noticed a couple of posts from some very bright young people who were complaining about their difficulty finding work. I did rather feel for them. Trouble is that it’s a hard time all round at the moment. Moreover, despite what our politicians tell us, I think it’s not likely to get any better any time soon. Therefore, rather than beating themselves up over this, I think we need all to stand back a little and take stock of what has happened to our once-great nation over the last few years:-

Main trouble is that we have squandered vast sums of money on two pointless Middle-Eastern wars – one of which was actually illegal, both of which lasted longer than World War II, and neither of which we stand the remotest chance of winning. Moreover, to hide his mismanagement of the economy, the one-eyed Scottish idiot in charge of this country, Gordon Brown, secretly flogged of huge chunks of the country’s gold reserves at a fraction of their value, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Meantime, he also allowed the banking system to fail to such an extent that he is now spending vast sums of money the Government does not actually have, in order to prop it up again. It is an unprecedented mess of near-biblical proportions. Don’t believe me, my little goslings? Take a gander at this:-

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat…/2187rank.html

Compare the UK’s position with that of say Germany or Japan – countries that wisely avoided the Iraq fiasco. Even more scary, the nation at the top, China, has actually lent the nation at the bottom, the United States, 40% of what Bush was blowing on Iraq at the rate of $2000 per second! Basically the planet’s supposedly richest nation is now in serious hock to China with no means of ever paying back the debt.

Worse, the USA’s new president, despite his election promises, seems determined to continue with the economic and political suicide that is Afghanistan. Right now, he is busy preparing another 50,000 young Americans to be pointlessly slaughtered, injured or seriously traumatised there – all at the US taxpayers expense, and no-doubt underwritten by financiers in Beijing.

Our long-term problems here in Blighty are even worse than those of the USA. For a start, our economy is linked far too closely to that of the USA – much more than any of our rivals for bottom place on the CIA chart. Then you need to turn the clock back to when Thacher and her cronies destroyed most of our industrial base, back in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Meantime they flogged off all our national utilities to the highest bidder under the great lie of the time, “Privatisation would improve quality of service.”

So today, key parts of our nation’s vital infrastructure is mismanaged by shabby privatised outfits such as British Telecom PLC – just as arrogant and untouchable as the GPO it replaced but with none of the public service ethic. And as a result, we have to put up with an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure that would not look out of place in sub-Saharan Africa. We have falling oil and gas reserves, mismanaged by gaggle of competing, often foreign-owned corporations, semi-regulated by incoherent and incomprehensible energy policies; road and rail systems that are a national disgrace… I could go on, but I won’t…

As a consequence, the bulk of our national wealth generation relies far too heavily on an American-led financial services sector, that is as incompetent as it is dishonest. And too many of its corporations and their senior executives now seem above the law as they go unpunished for fraud, deception and negligence on a mammoth scale. This alone has seriously damaged confidence within the business community. And despite taking billions of pounds of taxpayers money, and continuing to pay massive bonuses to their useless executives, the big banks are still not lending to the businesses that so desperately need it!

Of course, the true masters of dishonesty and incompetence are the self-seeking buffoons that make up our ailing New Labour Government. Its leaders, Blair and Brown have overseen levels of control-freakery, corruption, greed, sleaze, stupidity and total contempt for the electorate, to which the last Tory Government could only aspire!

So I’m afraid you young folks are in for a very hard time indeed – through absolutely no fault of your own. Moreover your children and possibly even their children will continue to pay for the legacy of the Bush-Blair-Brown-Obama era for many, many years to come.

Don’t have nightmares. Honk! Honk!